The Right to Evidence in Colombia: Favorable Aspects and Critics of the Reform of the General Procedural Code in the Substantive and Procedural Law

Abstract

Currently one of the structural mandates for the effective protection of rights is the fundamental right to the evidence, not only because of the new phenomenon of constitutionalization process but by the experience of individual cases, which have driven it serious reforms. Before the General Code of Procedure its reality reveals a citizen who comes to the administration of justice and sees defined the validity and effectiveness of its claim or exception through three systems: i) the ability or directed intention of his or her counterpart in providing or no evidence of the fact, which is another way to understand the classical notion of who has to show the evidence; ii) in the search for truth by the judge, through his functions; and iii) the surprise of looking for evidence, which the person is assigned to take the evidence get know in the judgment that he had to do it. Nowadays with the GCP and the Status of National and International Arbitration, the functions of the judge will increase, to be allowed to assign the burden of proving on the part of the procedural relationship which is in a better position to do so and enact measures evidentiary precautionary, which means to define and to study what we call the “input” or “bags” to which the judge can go intending to make an effective protection of the right to evidence the proposition stage and requirement of the test, which under this new legislation actually affects the substantive law of this fundamental right, on one hand, and the structure of this new institution towards some aspects that defined the GCP, which can be approached from its critical aspects in what is considered eminently procedural.